Gore, Ex-Apple Engineers Team Up to Blow Up the Book

What do you do after working for Apple, a company whose mission seems to be nothing less than disrupting entire industries? Easy. You start a company to create your own ding in the universe.

That's the idea behind Push Pop Press, a digital creation tool designed to blow up the concept of the book. Frictionless self-publishing is a fertile new space, but this particular startup got a little help from former vice president Al Gore, whose exacting demands on an app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis gave this would-be company its first real boost.

Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.

"The app is the richest form of storytelling," Matas said. "[Push Pop Press] opens doors to telling a story with more photos, more videos and interactions."

This article is part of a series of profiles about hit apps and the successful programmers behind them.See Also:

Push Pop Press is pushing into a widening niche within the print industry, which is scrambling to produce digital versions of books, magazines and newspapers in hopes of reversing declining revenues.

The platform comes as a slew of competitiors seek to upend the book publishing business, a shift that once seemed improbable but now inevitable, thanks to the success of new devices such as the iPad, Kindle and Nook. Notably, Amazon sold more e-books than hard-cover printed editions in the second quarter of 2010, just 33 months after the Kindle launched.

If e-books have been flying off the "shelves" for years, Push Pop Press aims to bring a new dimension to the platform, adding high-end graphics to the largely unadorned text offered in popular e-book editions like the Kindle. It's the latest bet – still unpaid after some 25 years of digital publishing– that plain old text is about to undergo a major evolution as authors and readers demand more interactivity.

For magazine publishers and newspapers, one of the trendiest technology solutions involves creating iPad or Android editions of publications – for which advertisers, so far, seem to pay at rates which rival print dollars instead of web pennies.

The 800-pound gorilla in this digital space is Adobe, whose tools are used to create some tablet periodicals (including the iPad version of WIRED magazine). But the complexity – and expense – of Adobe's Creative Suite is an opportunity for new entrants in the self-publishing game.

Problem is, it's neither easy nor cheap for dead-tree publishers to hire app programmers, or to purchase the resources necessary to digitize their publications with sexy code. And after factoring in the hefty costs of development and time spent on production, mobile apps have hardly proven a goldmine for major publishers.

If successfully scaled, Push Pop Press could become the easiest and quickest way for publishers and independent artists to turn their media into iPhone and iPad apps and take a whack at making money in the App Store.

Book apps created with the platform can take advantage of the iPad's and iPhone's advanced sensors, touchscreen gestures, microphone and powerful graphics chip to turn reading into a rich, interactive experience, Matas said. Videos, interactive diagrams and geotagged photos are just some elements that can be embedded in a book produced with the tool.

Not impressed with words alone? Check out Gore's tour of his book produced with Push Pop Press, embedded in the video below.

The former vice president's production company Melcher Media approached Matas in September 2009 to create an app version of Our Choice. Gore wanted his book app to contain videos, diagrams and other forms of multimedia that would flex the iPhone's muscle.

Matas sketched a concept and later discussed it with his former Apple co-worker Tsinteris. During his time at Apple, 25-year-old Matas focused on human-interface design for the iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X. And 30-year-old Tsinteris was deeply involved in developing the Maps app for the iPhone 3G, as well as some aspects of OS X.

After discussing the project, Matas and Tsinteris realized that in order to reproduce Gore's book, they needed tools that didn't exist yet.

"Kimon took a look at [the concept] and said that in order to build it we need to build a whole publishing platform," Matas said.

And if you're going to put that much effort into the tools, why stop after making just one book? The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.

Gore's book, which goes live in the App Store on Thursday morning, is in part a demonstration of the capabilities of Push Pop Press.

It's a bit like walking through a digital museum. When you first launch the app, you see a cover of a 3-D animation of a spinning globe with the title superimposed over it. Tapping into the intro plays a video of Gore introducing the book's topic.

From there, you swipe through a visual table of contents, and when you select a chapter, the chapter title appears on the top three quarters of the screen. A timeline at the bottom allows you to swipe through the pages. To start reading, you touch a page with two fingers to pop it open.

Diagrams embedded inside some of the chapters are interactive, inviting you to swipe the illustrations or even blow through the iPad's microphone to move a windmill, for example.

Photos are geotagged, so when you select an image and tap on a globe icon, you can see a world map with a pin showing precisely where the photo was taken.

For the pair, geotagging was one of their favorite features to add, because at Apple, they worked together on integrating GPS in the Maps application for the iPhone 3G.

"It's crazy how much context this brings to it," Matas said about the geotagged photos in Gore's book.

Every element inside Gore's enhanced e-book is composed of native iOS toolkits and APIs (e.g., Core Animation, Core Text and Objective C) to make the experience extremely smooth and fast.

"This speed is something you can't approach on a web browser," Matas said.

Pushing Into the Mainstream
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Gore's book is just the first of what Matas and Tsinteris hope will be a series of similarly interactive e-books. The pair are planning to release Push Pop Press as a piece of Mac software for anyone to create a book app in the future.

The programmers did not disclose an estimated ship date or price for the Push Pop Press publishing software, but they said the goal was to make it "very affordable."

When released, Push Pop Press could aggressively compete with Adobe. Currently, many publishers rely on Adobe's expensive Creative Suite tools to lay out their print pages and to digitize their content for Apple's iPad.

Push Pop Press could likely undercut Adobe on price, not to mention ease of using the product. An interactive magazine, book, comic book or photo essay can be created with Push Pop Press in as little as 20 minutes, the programmers claim.

However, Matas and Tsinteris don't view their software as a long-term competitor with Adobe. The software giant has a lock-down on the high-end of the creative field, Tsinteris said, and Push Pop Press' core audience will likely be smaller publishers looking for an easy, drag-and-drop solution to create apps.

"This is a layout tool, not a developer tool," Tsinteris said. "It's a little like playing with Legos."